Helping You to Understand Your Adversaries in This Time of Troubles

I'm getting tired of people on Facebook and BlueSky pointing out the absurdities and criminalities of Trump and his cultish supporters. Are you trying to understand this current cult of unreason? To account for its virulence? "Hey, such-and-such is obviously bad, openly evil. The only thing I have to do is point at it and say it out loud: 'This contradicts good sense, rationality, and all moral codes.'" As students of irrationality, you get a failing grade. And you're frozen in place. Pointing a finger is not taking action. There is zero strategizing. Your enemies are crazy because they are human, and like a member of the Bene Gesserit, you simply cannot look there.

When feudalism began to fail, and nobles fought endlessly to monopolize the land and the incomes land provided, all these hardships and disorders led to a growth of unreason and acting-out on the slimmest pretexts. It was one of the most typical example to be found in any Time of Troubles. All kinds of irrational heresies, like the Flagellants or the Beguines became as pandemic in Europe as the Plague itself: witchcraft, astrology, devil worship, dances of death, necromancy, and every degree of despair and emotional desperation. The geographic adventures of Christendom's era of exploration and discovery, which reached its peak with Marco Polo, stopped with his achievement and was only matched 100 years later with the exploits of the Portuguese in a new era of rising expectations, an era of increasing returns. Because of this new floruit stage, the degradation of Europe's material, social, and spiritual life which had persisted for more than 150 years was reversed suddenly, just before the middle of the 13th century. Around 1440 new life began to spring up with new hopes and renewed ambitions. This new flourishing age was based on the processes of a new organization of enrichment, commerce. This was a complete workaround of the previous feudal organization that had spawned the earlier 10th-century stage of increasing returns.

I suppose you could say that our familiarity with cults of unreason is a sign that we have barely exited the Time of Troubles that commenced about 1890, when Spiritualism and Theosophy were fads. Even with the New Deal, the West was not completely out of the Troubles. Since Roosevelt's reforms were incomplete, we have been pulled back in again. The revolting peasants this time are the most ardent true believers in capitalism: the lower middle class. We take the market so much for granted that we take it for granted, like the air we breathe. But not all lungs are equally clear, be the faith ever so simple.

Now for the void we cannot look into. Who is dangling most perilously in it?

Lockean philosophy doesn’t cause the madness of the petty bourgeoisie, but it plants the psychological architecture that makes a particular kind of madness almost inevitable when material conditions tighten. Once you see the structure, the whole thing snaps into focus. Let’s walk through it in a way that matches the civilizational frameworks I have been building—Toynbee, Veblen, the enduring self, the tragic misrecognitions of modernity.

1. Locke’s anthropology: the self as proprietor

Locke gives the West a new metaphysical center of gravity:

• The individual is a self-owning proprietor.

• Property is an extension of the self.

• Labor is the means by which the self “mixes” with the world.

• Freedom is the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor without interference.

This is a beautiful, stabilizing vision in a frontier or growth economy. It dignifies work, thrift, prudence—the “enduring self” in Protestant form. But it has a hidden trapdoor. Locke’s self is fragile. It must constantly prove itself through accumulation, improvement, and visible markers of independence. It is a self that can be invalidated by failure. This fragility is the seed of the later madness.

2. The petty bourgeoisie as the Lockean subject par excellence.

The petty bourgeoisie—small proprietors, shopkeepers, tradesmen, independent contractors—are the purest Lockean class:

• They own a little.

• They work a lot.

• They depend on their reputation.

• They live close to the edge.

• Their identity is fused with their property and labor.

They are the class for whom Locke’s metaphysics is not abstract philosophy but daily ontology. When times are good, this produces admirable virtues: thrift, diligence, self-respect, neighborliness. When times are bad, the same structure becomes combustible.

3. The crisis: when the Lockean self can no longer secure itself.

Hard times—debt, inflation, competition, technological displacement, globalization—strike the petty bourgeoisie at the level of identity, not just income.

Because if the self is a proprietor, then:

• Losing property = losing self.

• Losing independence = losing dignity.

• Losing status = losing moral worth.

• Losing solvency = losing legitimacy.

This is why the petty bourgeoisie often reacts to economic pressure with moral panic, conspiracy thinking, resentment, and apocalyptic politics.

They are not defending money. They are defending the metaphysical ground of their being.

4. The madness: when the Lockean self becomes impossible.

When the Lockean self becomes unattainable—because the economy has consolidated, finance has devoured margins, and the “independent proprietor” is structurally obsolete—the petty bourgeoisie faces a psychic impossibility:

They must be Lockean subjects in a world that no longer allows Lockean subjectivity.

This produces:

a. Hyper-moralization.

Everyone else is cheating, freeloading, corrupt, parasitic.

The world is full of “takers.”

The self is righteous because it suffers.

b. Conspiracy thinking.

If the world no longer rewards labor and thrift, then someone must be sabotaging the natural order.

c. Authoritarian longings.

Not for tyranny, but for a figure who will “restore fairness,” “punish the cheaters,” and “protect the little guy.”

d. Fantasies of purification.

The world must be cleansed of whatever force is preventing the Lockean cosmos from functioning.

e. Oscillation between victimhood and superiority:

“I am oppressed” and “I am the true backbone of the nation”. This is the classic petty-bourgeois double consciousness.

5. Why this becomes madness.

Because the Lockean metaphysics is no longer aligned with the material base of society.

The petty bourgeoisie is trying to live inside a 17th‑century ontology in a 21st‑century political economy.

The result is:

• Cognitive dissonance.

• Moral absolutism.

• Paranoia.

• Apocalyptic thinking.

• Scapegoating.

• Cultic politics.

Toynbee would say:

This is a schism of the soul—a class whose inherited moral code no longer matches its lived reality.

In my lexicon, this is the distempered self, the Lockean avatar cracking under conditions it was never designed to survive.

6. The tragic dimension.

The petty bourgeoisie is not wrong to feel endangered.

They are endangered.

But the tragedy is that they misrecognize the cause.

Instead of seeing:

• financialization.

• monopolization.

• global wage arbitrage.

• managerial consolidation.

• technological displacement.

they see:

• moral decay.

• conspirators.

• enemies within.

• cultural pollution.

• “the undeserving”.

This is the madness:

a metaphysical misdiagnosis of a material crisis.

This is the time of the Fractured Proprietor, or the Broken Lockean, or even a new polarity between the Enduring Self and the Ephemeral Market.